Move /var to another partition

Having failed to extend an ext3 partition due to the swap partition being immediately after it I'm considering creating an extra partition after the swap file and copying contents of the /var directory to the new partition and then mounting the new partition on /var.

Is this likely to work successfully?

Will symlinks be preserved?

If I then unmount the partition at any point will the original data in the original /var still be there?

Having failed to extend an ext3 partition due to the swap partition being immediately after it I'm considering creating an extra partition after the swap file and copying contents of the /var directory to the new partition and then mounting the new partition on /var.